


lay my loves upon the shore

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Borrowed Headcanon, Character Study, Gen, Running
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:59:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been years since he’s seen the snow in Sankt-Peterburg, all the way across the universe in Russia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lay my loves upon the shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eudaimon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/gifts).



> Written for [](http://trek-exchange.livejournal.com/profile)[**trek_exchange**](http://trek-exchange.livejournal.com/), in response to [](http://racheldeet.livejournal.com/profile)[**racheldeet**](http://racheldeet.livejournal.com/)'s request for a Chekov character study. Super-huge thanks to [](http://mirroriste.livejournal.com/profile)[**mirroriste**](http://mirroriste.livejournal.com/) for keeping me on task with this, and especially [](http://eudaimon.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://eudaimon.livejournal.com/)**eudaimon** , whose Chekov head-canon I borrow liberally from.

It’s been years since he’s seen the snow in Sankt-Peterburg, all the way across the universe in Russia; _home_. It was all he knew before he joined Starfleet, the only thing he had to compare his world to, and so his homeland made itself as much a part of him as his name or the things he loved and lived for. It _was_ what he loved, what he lived for, and everything he could possibly know of the universe came from there. He was born so late at night that when his papa tells of that day, he recalls the starshine reflected back from the snow into the sky, so ethereal and mysterious, and says that it was no wonder Pavel wanted to leave Sankt-Peterburg behind for those stars. His dreams were born with him that night, Andrei would say, deep in the middle of the dark, bitter cold of the Russian winter, and Pavel never had the sense to recognize that he was chasing the impossible across the universe, looking to solve equations that had no answer.

He didn’t think much about the distance, the impossibility of it all, when he was in the Academy, working through the night, hunched over his console with his curls torn into disarray. He didn’t have time to think about it then because he was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and so many years younger than everyone else in his year. There were theorems to disprove, algorithms to perfect, and his self-worth to demonstrate to everyone who ever thought he was too young to make it. He worked harder and longer than anyone else, earned his way to the top of his class in two subjects and was an expert in yet another. It was enough to earn him his place on the _Enterprise_ , on the bridge crew of the flagship of the fleet.

It wasn’t enough to earn him time home, on the banks of the Neva with his papa telling stories of his mother and her bright eyes and brighter laugh. Pavel had hated the stories when he was younger because he was a boy and he didn’t want to hear the love stories of his parents; choosing to chase along the same paths his mother had all those years before he was born under the stars, even before he even knew they were the same paths and patterns and that he carried more of her than anyone, or that it broke and mended his papa’s heart a little bit every time he saw him.

It’s later, when he’s thousands and millions of light years away from Sankt-Peterburg—Piter—and the Neva and his papa, homesick and lonely and too stubborn to ever let it show, that Pavel thinks about his parents’ love stories and wishes that he’d stopped and listened just one more time, just long enough to remember them when he needs to remember. He’s worked too hard to let it all be undone because he misses bitter winters and the rolling rumble of his papa’s voice when they stretched out in front of the hearth on their bellies like they did in the summer beside the Neva; when they laughed and sometimes fell a little too silent, reminiscing on their shared solitude with one another.

It isn’t that Pavel doesn’t like life on the _Enterprise_. He’s twenty now, young and eager as he was on the first day, when he was first assigned under Captain Pike. He’s just a little more experienced now, a little wiser to the universe and her ever-present dangers. He’s had his fair share of rough encounters, his first away mission, when Captain Kirk finally gave in and let him go on one three weeks after he turned eighteen. It was routine and boring, but the first of many to come and Pavel had survived them all. All of them, including that bizarre night on that pleasure planet and the civil war on Orion, which he nearly _didn’t_ survive. If he’s proven anything, he’s proven that he can survive the universe that everyone thought he was too young to make it in. No one will ever again say that Pavel Chekov couldn’t do it, that there was anything that he had set himself to that had eluded him.

No, it’s not that he hasn’t made himself into the officer he dreamed of being since he was a child, since he first heard of Starfleet and navigating his way through the stars; since the night he was born. He stands on the observation deck and stares out at the inky black oblivion that he has made into his whole life. It looks so different here than in Piter, where the stars burn in distant specks of fiery light, holes in God’s universe too far to touch, and reflect on the pale, crystalline snow. To imagine navigating through them when he is home, even when he knows all of their names, all the planets in their systems, is impossible. Here he almost could touch them. Here he can believe that the stars are nothing more than self-destructing balls of burning gas and light, tearing themselves apart in continuous combustion for eons, bringing life to their circling planets. It’s science, physics and chemistry together at once.

It’s something he understands, something he can quantify and plug into an equation and watch as it turns out the mathematical answers to the universe.

At home, in Piter, standing on the banks of the Neva, when the winter nights are dark and bitterly cold, he doesn’t try to understand the secrets of the stars. They shine cold, bright and ethereal, hardly scientific or measurable. He knows better than to try, anyway. Their bright shine that holds the answers to the universe is something he could never understand, no matter how far or how long he chases across the universe trying.

He is sure that he doesn’t want to understand either, if it means giving up the chase.


End file.
